Dead Felon May Have Hidden Art from Bankruptcy Trustee

Even a year after Barry Stokes’s death in a federal prison, the court-appointed trustee winding down the convicted Tennessee fraudster’s business is still searching for eighty pieces of potentially valuable art that Stokes may have hid.

Bankruptcy trustee John McLemore believes Stokes selected 80 of some 2,000 pieces of Japanese art he once owned and stashed them in order to provide himself a source of funds in anticipation of being released, the Tennessean newspaper in Nashville reported.

While most of Stokes’s art collection was found in the possession of his third wife, the missing pieces eat at McLemore.

“It’s like a guy hiding money from you,” McLemore told the paper. “You know the money exists. You just don’t know where it is.”

Stokes, who owned Dickson, Tenn., benefits manager 1Point Solutions, was sentenced to 12½ years in prison the after he was convicted in 2008 of defrauding his clients of $19 million. He died last year in a prison hospital.

McLemore is managing 1Point Solutions’ bankruptcy and is attempting to recover Stokes’s assets in an effort to repay creditors, including victims of the fraud.

While the missing art could be valuable (some pieces of the woodblock print collection have been priced at $25,000, the Tennessean reported) even recovering all 80 pieces would make little dent on the more than $30 million Stokes’s business owes to creditors.

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